Well, my choices today weren't as helpful to me as yesterday's but it was still a good day.
But I'm going to talk about dinner first. By the way it's sort of a joke in our family that when we travel, we enjoy seeing the sights, the architecture, etc. but we come home and talk about the FOOD. So, for those of you who know Cincinnati, I ate at Arnold's (on the patio, if that's what you call it).
I started out with "Lies and Sins of Omission" by Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens. She was pleased so see so many of us in the room at 8 am. And she was good. We all need to deal with lies, omission and family legend while we are researching. Liz, as she introduced herself, showed that even though we have 4 or 5 documents that all support the same fact, that fact may not be correct. Her example of a man whose records all claimed he was born in New Jersey, and come to find out he was naturalized at about age 23 with his father because he and his father immigrated from Ireland when he (the son) was about 3.
Next session I crowded into a room with a few hundred other people to hear Elizabeth Shown Mills talk on "Indexes! Indexes! Indexes! . . ." She presents her facts so "quietly" I guess you call it. Her syllabus is concise, makes taking notes easy, and then provides us with 2 pages (1 page back to back) with all of the great examples she had provided on her slides. Thank you so much ESM.
The last session of the day I heard Claire Bettag speak on "Assumptions: A Genealogical Slippery Slope." Yes, I am attending quite a few BCG Skillbuilding sessions, but that's what I think I need right now. I wish she had spent a little less time on the actual BCG standards, but the information provided was good.
As a side note, I really don't like to be read to. I don't think that slides should have everything that is printed on the syllabus and that someone should be reading it to me. I think that's overkill. And if the speakers are reading it just so that those who buy a CD have all of the information, then perhaps we, sitting there, shouldn't have everything on our pages. The two sessions that I haven't mentioned specifically still have a page each in the syllabus that will be helpful. Unfortunately, neither speaker even mentioned some of this.
Tonight I went to the Cincinnati-Hamilton County Library. I had made a list of microfiche to look at. Unfortunately after looking at all of the pages, there wasn't anything that helped me. But that's OK. The staff at the library was great. The tables were filled: overfilled in some cases. Can you image all of these librarians willing to help researchers until 11:30 tonight? And I know that some of them worked today also. I would have looked at some books but they had to be requested and brought up from another location. So I decided to come back to the room, sit with my feet up, and catch up on emails, blog reading and then writing this.
NGS 2012 is half over. Tomorrow Elizabeth Shown Mills and Tom Jones are both presenting in the morning. (No not at the same time.) I am trying to decide whether to just purchase the CDs rather than try to crowd into the room. When the chairs are so close together, and all the chairs are filled, it's just so difficult to take notes. AND, if I buy the CDs then I can listen to them over and over.
